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A Penn Libraries milestone was reached on May 3, 2016, when the number of electronic titles in Franklin Catalog surpassed the number of print titles. Franklin Catalog describes the Penn Libraries collections. Its bibliographic records identify more than 7.6 million books and documents in print and electronic formats, journals and other periodicals in print and …

Note: Web address originally referenced has been updated. Please see end of entry for new web address Philadelphia, PA, March 3rd, 2016—The Penn Libraries is excited to announce the debut of the online home for its Holy Land collections. The Holy Land Collections website features a wide range of special and general collections related to …

As we near the 11th anniversary of ScholarlyCommons, we are also getting closer to yet another milestone in ScholarlyCommons history: 10 million downloads. With over 25,000 objects and over 2 million downloads a year, this milestone is closer than you might expect – likely just a few months away! Watch the download count rise as …

The inscription is a note to Henry VIII from wife number four of six, Anne of Cleves, written in a 1533 book of hours from the Folger Shakespeare Library (STC 15982). Continue reading at //provenanceonlineproject.wordpress.com/2

In honor of the visit of Pope Francis to Philadelphia this week, the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies is sharing a number of the Penn Libraries’ Pope-related items. The featured image is from Ms. Codex 85, Bullarium Augustinianum, (fol. 1r) written in Italy around 1506 (per a note on the manuscript, fol. 124v). Ms. Codex …

PHILADELPHIA, PA July 2015—They are treasures that have survived centuries and even millennia: one of the world’s oldest fragments of the gospel of Saint Matthew; the first Bible printed in the Americas, in the Native American language of Massachuset; a New Testament Bible published in twelve languages in Nuremberg, Germany, 1599; the earliest version of …

This summer, the Penn Libraries will begin the construction of the last phase of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. The construction project will take place on the fifth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center. The project will provide two structural benefits to the Libraries and the Penn community: a secure, …

This post was written by the Penn Libraries Bass Teaching and Learning Fellow, Catrice Barrett On Monday, June 16, I had the privilege of delivering the commencement address to the graduating class of Kensington International Business High School (KIBHS). The honor of speaking to such a promising group of young students is one that I owe to Matt Pilecki …

In September of 2013, the Penn Libraries received from Doris Gundert Balant a gift of 47 home movies from the family of Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Eugene Ormandy (1899-1985). This past fall the films were reformatted to digital video, helping to prolong the life of the originals, while simultaneously providing broad access to their content. Now …

An annotated English Bible that belonged to Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651-1720) and passed down through his family for three centuries has returned to Philadelphia. Pastorius, credited with being the founder of Germantown (now part of Philadelphia), emigrated from Germany in 1683 and quickly became an important figure in the new colony. This Bible joins two …

Penn has completed digitization of the Japanese Juvenile Fiction Collection at Penn Libraries, dating from the late Meiji (1868-1912) and Taisho (1912-1926) periods. These are small, mass-market books never intended for long-term use, so the digitization not only shares full copies of these books with the worldwide research community, but also preserves them for posterity. …

The Ray Evans papers document the life and career of Hollywood lyricist and Penn alum Ray Evans. Graduating from Penn in 1936, Evans went on to form the song-writing team of Livingston & Evans, with fellow Penn alum, Jay Livingston. Continue reading at https://pennrare.wordpress.com

Open Access is a movement, propelled by the issues of social inequality that guide the ways in which we provide access to information and research.

Opening up science, humanities, arts, and the research and data that drive them is about maintaining an open society and, ultimately, it is about democracy and democratizing access to knowledge. Continue reading →

This unique collection documents American History from the earliest settlers…It is sourced from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, one of the finest archives available for the study of American History. This Module has three major sub-collections: Henry Knox Papers -This is a crucial collection of documents that sheds light on the revolutionary era and the beginnings … Continue reading →

Migration to New Worlds I & II: A Century of Migration & The Modern Era explores the movement of peoples from Great Britain, Ireland, mainland Europe and Asia to the New World and Australasia. Split across two modules, and including collections from 26 archives, libraries and museums, Migration to New Worlds brings together the movement and … Continue reading →

Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer article, “Could a toxic site be on your Philly block?”, reports on a new book, Sites Unseen : uncovering hidden hazards in American cities / Scott Frickel and James R Elliott (Russell Sage Foundation, 2018). Sites Unseen, available to Penn readers as a JSTOR ebook and in print (although you may need … Continue reading →

Two recent working papers from the National Bureau of Economic Research report on Philadelphia’s beverage tax. This tax, implemented in January 2017, added $0.015 per ounce to the price of sweetened beverages in Philadelphia. The beverage tax is levied on distributors, not retail vendors; it is levied on both regular (caloric) and diet (noncaloric) sweetened … Continue reading →

The Penn Libraries have joined an ebooks pilot program bringing the 2018 frontlist titles from Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and Cornell University Presses, and the University of Toronto Press to Penn readers. This pilot program, hosted by De Gruyter, ebook publisher for the five university presses, is projected to contain 830 titles when completed. These titles … Continue reading →